"In marksmanship, the shooter must train to act unnaturally. Focus on the front sight tip and not the intended target" -ALBERT H. LEAGUE III

America's formative years coincided with a remarkable revolution in firepower, and that revolution propelled American expansion as the young nation gobbled up its frontier and pursued the genocide of its native peoples and its wars against Britain and Spain for control of the American continent. No less significantly, this revolution in fire power began just in time for the United States to turn on itself in the Civil War. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the infantryman's weapon was still the flintlock musket, a clumsy and inaccurate weapon that had been in service for two centuries and was little different from the matchlocks, wheel locks, snaplocks and snaphaunces that had served for the two centuries previous. But in scarcely twenty-five years, the rifle replaced the musket and transformed warfare.
Accuracy and rate of fire were the chief problem of the musket era. The musket provided a high rate of fire by the standards of its day: a trained infantryman could load and fire his musket as many as five times a minute. But this rate of fire came at a price. The musket was quick to load because it was a smoothbore weapon firing a relatively loose-fitting ball, which was easy to ram down a dirty barrel. But thanks to that same smoothbore barrel, it was woefully inaccurate except at short range. The prospects of hitting a man at anything more than fifty yards were poor, and became rapidly worse as the billowing white smoke of black powder guns obscured the battlefield. Taking aim was pointless. A massed formation of infantry was simply supposed to throw enough lead in the general direction of the enemy that someone was bound to be hit, which would have been a very silly idea were it not for the fact that everyone cooperated by forming the infantry up in tightly massed ranks, the better to repel cavalry charges.
The early rifle, which reached the peak of its development in the American longrifle of the Revolutionary War era, had the opposite problem. A rifle could hit a target out to two hundred yards, thanks to the stabilizing spin that its rifled barrel put on the ball. But the benefits of rifling depended on a tight fit between ball and bore, and ramming a tight-fitting ball down a barrel fouled by the residue of burning black powder took time. The rifleman was too slow. And as he loaded, he was vulnerable to cavalry, charging with elegance, fashion sense, sabre, and lance. A massed formation of riflemen could easily be routed by a cavalry charge. And so the rifle remained largely a hunter's gun, its use in war limited to snipers and "skirmishers," small units of light infantry sent out ahead of the main body to harass the enemy. The battlefield belonged to the volley fire of massed infantry armed with fast-loading inaccurate muskets.
What infantry commanders needed was a weapon that combined the accuracy of the rifle with the musket's easy loading. That weapon was the rifled musket, made practical by a Frenchman, Claude-Etienne Minie, who developed the first widely used cylindro-conoidal - that is, bullet-shaped - bullet. Minie's bullet, called the "Minie ball," fit loosely into the barrel like a musket ball, so that a soldier could easily ram it down on the powder charge. But unlike a musket ball, its hollow base deformed as the power charged ignited, sealing the sides of the bullet against the barrel and allowing the rifling to do its work. The Minie ball appeared in 1849, put an end to four hundred years of the smoothbore musket, and ushered in the age of the rifle just in time for the American Civil War.
The history of warfare is the history of the balance of power between offence and defence, between cavalry and infantry, a balance continually tilted and toppled by technology. For years, that balance had been stable. The massed infantry's bristling hedgehog rows of bayonets and whizzing musket balls kept cavalry at bay; victory waited only on musket and cannon fire to smash holes in those ranks and let the cavalry go to work. The rifled musket now tilted the balance. The accuracy and range of rifled muskets drove infantry into entrenched positions and commenced the decline of cavalry, a decline that would continue until the cavalry finally exchanged its horses for tanks. And the American Civil War consumed the lives of more than 750,000 soldiers on both sides.
But to industrial warfare, 750,000 lives were merely hors d'oeuvres. The revolution in firepower was just getting started. The rifled musket was still a muzzle-loader, and muzzle-loaders, with separate powder charge, wad, and bullet, were just too slow. The answer was the breech-loading rifle, firing a ready-made, one-piece cartridge.
The Snider-Enfield entered British Army service immediately after the Civil War, in 1866. It adapted a breech-loading action invented by an American, Jacob Snider, to the 1853 muzzle-loading Enfield rifle, which had fired a Minie ball. The external hammer, which on the 1853 Enfield had struck a percussion cap, now drove a firing pin into the primer of the .577 cartridge. And although the Snider-Engield was a single-shot rifle, it allowed a trained rifleman to reload, aim, and fire ten shots a minute. Even so, it was a stopgap weapon, a modification of an existing rifled musket rather than a purpose-build rifle. In 1871, the Martini-Henry, a single-shot, breech-loading lever-action rifle based on a Civil War-era American design, replaced it in the British Army.

As the British Army transitioned from musket to rifle, American know-how was driving ahead, adopting the revolution in firepower to the needs of a young and violent nation intent on taming its frontier, killing its native people, and fulfilling its manifest destiny. In the same year the Snider-Enfield entered service, another American innovation had already pointed to the future: the Winchester Model 1866 repeating rifle. Unlike the single-shot rifles used by the world's armies, the Winchester featured a built-in magazine, from which it loaded a fresh cartridge every time the shooter worked the lever action. Improved models quickly followed. A Winchester 1873 chambered in .44-40 could fire fourteen shot without reloading, and the rifleman recharged the magazine simply by pushing fresh rounds into the loading port on the side of the receiver. Against this innovation, the Snider-Enfield's ten shots a minute was comically slow. The future had arrived.
Only twenty-four years had passed since the introduction of the Minie ball ended the four-century reign of the smoothbore musket. Within another twenty-five years, the world would have its first machine guns. The significance of the revolution in firepower is difficult to comprehend today; we are too used to modern guns, too habituated to the way things are. But for the nineteenth-century soldier, warfare had been radically transformed. The whole game had changed. And the consequences of that transformation reached beyond the ranks of the infantry and their unit drill, beyond battlefield tactics, and gripped the national psyche. The invention of the modern rifle was no less significant than the arrival of the Internet and the smartphones that followed.
In Europe and North America, the rifle seized the high ground in the martial imagination that would later be taken over by the aeroplane and the tank. Victory on the battlefield now depended not on the mechanical discipline of well-drilled troops but on the marksmanship of the individual rifleman. A force of trained marksmen would easily defeat troops who had not been instructed in the proper, scientific use of the rifle, in the principles of its use and the technique of estimating range. And since training marksmen takes time, and since in the era of mass warfare you go to war with what you're got, any nation that wished to be taken seriously as a military power would have to turn its farmers, its shopkeepers, and its bankers into marksmen. Every nation would have to become a nation of riflemen.Canada was born just in time to join the fun. Few Canadians are aware that first sport to receive federal funding in their fair and peaceful land, almost as soon as Canada became Canada, was rifle shooting. In 1867, the British North America Act created Canada; in 1868, motivated by the need to defend peace, order, and good government, Canada became a nation of riflemen through a Militia Act that created a 40,000-man active militia. The federal government was soon funding the newborn Dominion of Canada Rifle Association to the tune of ten thousand dollars a year. Ottawa also provided rifles to all active militia members, bought and rented rifle ranges for the Rifle Association, funded rifle competitions, and provided a supply of cheap ammunition. National defence was an urgent matter. Everyone still remembered the Fenian Raids. With all that money behind them, Canadian shooters were soon winning medals in international rifle matches, and in 1871 at Wimbledon - a venue then known for rifle-shooting, and not for tennis - took prizes in all events they entered.
"In England, and more especially in Canada, the policy of providing ranges of sufficient extent for long-range rifle practice, has developed a large and formidable force for national defense," remarked an 1872 editorial in the "New York Times. "Canada today has 45,000 trained marksmen among her volunteers, England 150,000, while the United States has none." The Times even agreed that there was some merit to the common public view of the New York National Guard as a force "terrible only in the eyes of boys and young women; and whose chief victories are won on the floors of ballrooms." This was the best-organized state militia in the United States, yet its members suffered "lamentable ignorance in the proper use of their weapons," and were they to come up against Canada's crack shots ... well, America could hardly pretend that losing would not matter, which is one of several ways in which warfare differs from Olympic hockey.
In 1871, dismayed by the poor shooting they had seen among Union recruits in the Civil War, and sharing the popular view that individual marksmanship would settle the fate of nations. General George Wingate and Colonel William C. Church followed the example set by Canada and Britain and founded the NRA to "promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis." For help, they turned to the experts. The NRA sent emissaries to Canada, Germany, and England to confer with expert marksmen and military thinkers, and Canadian rifle shooters were soon helping to instruct the NRA's members. In 1872, when the NRA started building the first rifle range in the United States at Creedmoor on Long Island, they enlisted the assistance of their Canadian counterparts. Even when it comes to NRA, we can blame Canada.
In the late-nineteenth century, rifle shooting was a mainstream sport, and the New York Times and Toronto's Globe newspaper reported the results of shooting matches as they do golf today (A.J. Somerset, "Arms: The culture and credo of the gun", BIBLIOASIS, Windsor, Ontario 2015).